Valent Is a KDE Connect Client for GTK-Based Desktops
linuxuprising.com
linuxuprising.com
I've only been able to connect it right after a fresh install, but after I reboot it doesn't see the phone anymore.
Is your experience better?
I was travelling for a month and decided to put my sim card in a cheap android phone and connect to it remotely to keep getting SMS 2FA rather than getting roaming. After about two weeks KDE connect over tailscale said the phone didn't exist, so I was glad I'd set up google's remote sms as a backup. (I verified through tailscale it was still connected).
What can this do? Using Valent (and KDE Connect), you can:
- receive Android phone notifications on your desktop and reply to messages
- sync the clipboard between your Android device and desktop
- control music playing on your desktop from your Android phone
- share files between your desktop and Android device, and browse your phone from the desktop
- send SMS from your desktop
- execute predefined commands from your Android phone to run on your desktop
- control your desktop's mouse and keyboard from the Android device
- browse your Android device filesystem from your desktop wirelessly
- and more
Also when you say: don't trust Telegram, while not saying anything about WhatsApp, you are, on average, pushing people from a solution that isn't proven to be trustworthy to a solution that is proven to be untrustworthy.
Because unless you simultaneously point out that WhatsApp is worse, that is where people will go if they listen to you and avoid Telegram.
(Even in general, I think that Telegram is no clear win over WhatsApp, and in fact I'd consider it worse in terms of chat message security.)
I really can't understand why you bright folks here on HN falls for WhatsApps marketing.
E2E means absolutely nothing as long as the messages are siphoned away in broad daylight.
That said: avoid Telegram all you want. But if you mean no one should ever touch it, I hope you are also against physical mail which is way less secure and also email which is way less secure than Telegram.
I don't have that backup enabled. Does that mean that WhatsApp is secure for me with everyone who also has that disabled?
I don't see how Telegram is better in that respect; the server sees all messages directly. It doesn't even need a documented backdoor like you described.
> under an agreement that let Google rummage through them(!) to their "send the data in a sidechannel directly to Facebook for analysis while also sending it end-to-end-encrypted to the recipient".
*EDIT*: Can you give a link to that agreement? It'd interest me. :)
> But if you mean no one should ever touch it
That's not what I said.
As long as no one of them enables it, probably.
I don't know if this agreement is in place any longer, but you should be able to find references to it using a search engine.
I've not found it quickly. I found this article which doesn't mention it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/where-whatsapp-went-wr.... Since you made the claim, I'd usually ask you to substantiate it.
I admit the links I found now are less clear than I though and I don't have more time now, but there is clearly reason to be suspicious when 1.) Facebook stops encrypting data before upload 2.) Google accept to keep the data without counting it against the users quota 3.) sources claim there was a deal. None of these three carries too much weight on their own but together they paint a picture that something is going on.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28485312
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/17/22180258/google-whatsapp...
[3]: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20428869-the_state_o...
So far Telegram hasn't been caught once the last decade while WhatsApp has been caught at least twicem
Of course, there are many local alternatives as well. I just can't see cloud upload features as an alternative to a local network transfer mechanism.
I really with the Photos app did. I don't think a "Pro" phone is a Pro phone without that feature.
Few years ago i had kde and used kde connect, but i didn't want that much qt in my life (can't stand it), and switched to gnome. There was gsconnect but it wasn't that realiable. Used that for a while but in the end i switched to sway, becaus twms are great and everything is so much snappier. But one thing was missing, kdeconnect. I didn't want qt, and gsconnect was a gnome extension. I tried several other alternatives to, but nothing was as good.
For example the only qt application i use is wireshark, it looks to me like windows 7, hijacks my input several times when i want to type somewhere else, hovering over menu items at the top is always off for me,...
And GTK seems to work better for me with tiling window managers, as popups are by default not windows (idk what they are), this way if I click on something and a popup or dialog comes up, it stays as a popup or dialog and doesn't take up half of my screen and splits my screen.
GTK isn't perfect, but at least it looks good and is more pleasent to use for me.
GSConnect is from Daniel Landau.
Today, why would anyone choose anything except KDE?
In the context of the prior comment which was choosing between Gnome and KDE the fact that applications require you to have half of KDE is meaningless as you are if you pick KDE going to install all of KDE already.
In the context of installing KDE apps outside of KDE this is fairly overblown. Most people have hundreds of GB to TB of storage available and will install games which require 60GB. At this point in time worrying about KDE installing a few gigs of deps is like worrying about the difference in ram used by Emacs vs Vim.
I use GNOME myself but GNOME is anything but lean and stable - Alt+F2 r is for me a staple and it doesn't work correctly under Wayland, it's GUI is horribly slow, every extension worsening the problem. I mostly only use GNOME myself because I stopped caring about how slow things are and I'm lazy.
> One KDE package wants to pull in pretty much all the dependencies for a full desktop environment which isn't what I want to do.
Well, any GNOME thing wants to pull the entire GNOME thing AND systemd. Much worse.
For me, it’s the wonky Active Directory integration/support that is the dealbreaker.
There also still are big issues in KDE that "just work" on basically every other system (including Windows and macOS). KIO, Akonadi and Baloo come to mind immediately - all great ideas that in reality never really work.
(I say this as someone who daily drives KDE on both Wayland and X11 - to me, the features are certainly worth dealing with the issues)
GNOME does at least get a lot of corporate development and backing to make it integrate into Active Desktop, centrally-managed settings (aka group policy), and accessibility functions. These aspects are rather large reasons that big enterprise distributions default to GNOME over all other choices.
Most users care about none of those features. Some people just like GNOME. Some people like KDE. It's simply a choice.
I still have to put up with many, many downsides around its stability, bugs, resource consumption, being written in C++ and builds being a nontrivial exercise.
I can sympathize with those for whom KDE does not suit well.
My preferred distro is KDE Neon, based on Ubuntu base but with KDE devs providing the KDE layer on top.
I have found this combination excellent and while I am sure it uses more resources than lightweight distros it actually seems to save me resources when I move load (IntelliJ, VSCode, Cypress) from my Windows host machine to my KDE running under WSL. Even on the limited memory and CPU I give this VM it seems to handle them a lot nicer than when I run the GUI apps in the host machine and only run Maven/Quarkus + Node + WSL part of VSCode on WSL.
And with the most recent update of WSL, running GUI apps from WSL has become effortless. (I admit some rough edges like IntelliJ sometimes freezing after suspend resume etc, but nothing that takes time or effort to resolve.)
I am using KDE on Wayland on Fedora, and so far it's the most polished Linux desktop experience I've ever had.
Maybe it's my experience with KDE4 that turned me off after KDE3, then tidal changes of stability in KDE5 that undermined my trust.
Other desktops exist that use GTK. Such as Mate, which is still a very decent desktop and show just how far Gnome has fallen in the past decade. Some of us are very happy to have an application which will work for us that doesn't require pulling in Gnome's junk or KDE's junk.
[1] - https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj...
How does it work? What apps are compatible? How is the connection between devices set up? Wire guard? If not, then what? How does it control apps and receive notifications?
At first it sounded to me like an alternative X11 thing
I hate it when projects/products only state what you can do (or at least what they envision), and not explaining the actual workings. Especially when data and access gets more and more important.
Same with I think it was postbox.. nice app, but they didn’t tell you that they need full access to your account, store “securely” on their server.. no thank you.
KDE framework has KIO library which provides network-transparent file access (that's why Konqueror works a file manager and a browser simultaneously). IIRC the author of KDE Connect was tinkering over sending notifications to a phone app and found out you can make much more with it.
> How is the connection between devices set up?
The server part uses 1716/UDP for broadcasting it's presence and 1716-1764/TCP to communicate with clients. The client had to be paired with server (like in Bluetooth), the communication is done via TLS, file browsing works over SFTP.
> How does it control apps and receive notifications?
Everything is done via plugins, both sides choose which ones are enabled and some have their own control schemes (i.e. whitelist of apps to sync notifications from phone).
it integrates in the desktop UI (and standard protocols, e.g. D-Bus, the "share as..." feature, etc) & phone UI (and standard protocols, e.g. MPRIS, the Android "share" feature, etc), it's mostly not about apps but about the shell, although some apps have nice additional integrations through extensions, like firefox.
For instance:
- when I copy on my linux desktop I can paste on my phone
- I can share links, files, etc between phone and desktop trivially (through the usual android feature on the phone, and through right-click in my desktop)
- when I have media playing either in my desktop media player or in web browsers I can control the playback from the phone
- I can use my phone as a remote control when I give talks & presentations
- I see my phone notifications on my desktop
etc
It's really the only thing that makes Android remotely tolerable for me.
I don't mean to be harsh, but really? There is entire bullet point list on the page, and yes, I didn't include it in my response. Ironic.
Actually I read your response, then I read the article and still came away confused as to what it does, and I use Linux and KDE as the daily driver for work. So now you’ve wasted my time finding the answer to the question instead of just answering a question likely a lot of people will have. Yes, op could have googled that information themselves. However, the valid criticism of OP is that upon having that question they should have googled the answer and then posted their question with the answer proactively. But “did you even RTFA” is not a helpful meta discussion to have. It’s useful to check the comments first to see whether TFA is even worth reading so having this answered about a more obscure piece of software seems totally valid. And someone did paste the bulleted list of features for Valent itself in this thread too so the rhetoric is just a bit too sanctimonious at chewing out a fellow person without providing value to everyone else reading your comment.
This one is on you bro.
It works VERY well. The app itself mostly stays out of the way and things "just work". No noticeable latency even using the remote keyboard functionality.